{"id":2540,"date":"2021-10-14T09:05:58","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T07:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/herito.pl\/?post_type=artykul&p=2540"},"modified":"2022-06-13T15:00:10","modified_gmt":"2022-06-13T13:00:10","slug":"only-avenues","status":"publish","type":"artykul","link":"https:\/\/herito.pl\/en\/artykul\/only-avenues\/","title":{"rendered":"Only Avenues"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Landscape is part of civilisation. Landscape narrates history; it is yet another of its texts. Everything counts here: the\u00a0roads, straight or meandering, the\u00a0expanses of \ufb01elds, the\u00a0arrangement and species of trees, the\u00a0ways in which buildings are grouped, walls and fences, the\u00a0location of churches and castles, the\u00a0compact greenery of parks or orchards. A special feature of these signs is their permanence. Landscape changes slowly. Roads can be the\u00a0witnesses to centuries, the\u00a0borders of properties lay for generations, and trees live longer than the\u00a0people who planted them. But\u00a0sometimes changes occur which are more than violent. The\u00a0journey to K\u00f6nigsberg through the\u00a0lands of the\u00a0former Prussia traces a\u00a0path through a\u00a0landscape visited by a\u00a0historical disaster.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is a strange land. Flat or gently rolling, not especially fertile and not especially populous \u2013 a European backwater, it would seem. And yet in the modern period on a number of occasions it became the scene of events focusing the attention of the entire world. It was here, during the winter campaign of 1806\u20131807, that Napoleon routed the Prussian and Russian armies and then concluded a peace agreement establishing a continental blockade. It was here, during the August campaign of 1914, that the tsarist army was crushed, which to a large extent determined the course of events on the Eastern Front and led to the collapse of the Romanov empire. And finally it was here, in 1945, that the end of the world came. Old K\u00f6nigsberg burnt down under the Allied bombs and the Red Army completed the destruction. The people who did not flee were murdered or exiled, and the province was divided with a new border, drawn using a ruler (following the practice of the colonial powers in Africa), and became part of two states. New inhabitants appeared, and everything that they found here was thoroughly alien to them.<\/p>\n

Today the\u00a0traveller is struck by the\u00a0contrast be-tween the\u00a0enterprising and busy activity in the\u00a0Polish province and the\u00a0decline observed on the\u00a0Russian side. The\u00a0strangest place is the\u00a0touching point between these two realities: the\u00a0 border crossing. In\u00a0the\u00a0neat and functional buildings raised by European Union money the\u00a0Soviet style reigns supreme: a\u00a0mixture of laziness, sense of power and arrogance.<\/p>\n

A void begins after the border posts. It gives a good illustration of what would happen to the landscape if there were no people and agriculture, which, after all, is a form of cultivating landscape. Yes, agriculture undoubtedly did exist here. The fields have not yet been overrun with woods \u2013 there are just more or less dense bushes and occasional clumps of self-sown plants no older than a dozen years. There are no villages to speak of. Sometimes you see overgrown orchards or groups of neglected buildings, the non-residential ones looking the most decrepit. The people have moved to towns and cities, mostly to the capital. I remember an apocalyptic prognosis saying what would happen to the world if for some reason the people disappeared. This vision started with the New York underground being flooded and ended with a forest covering the entire northern hemisphere. The most lasting relics of our civilisation would be sinks made of stainless steel and bronze monuments. There is something to this: in every small city the bronze Lenin is in an excellent state of repair.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0is diffi cult to believe that such a\u00a0hostile land generated a\u00a0state which gave rise to a\u00a0European superpower. The\u00a0 strength of leadership, the\u00a0 collective will to act must have been tremendous! Perhaps this also stood behind what still joins together both parts of Eastern Prussia. This common element is avenues \u2013 the\u00a0French invention, which spread all over Europe in the\u00a0Enlightenment era. Avenues produce shade, important for horses and travellers but not leading to mud drying up, for roads improved rapidly; some were even paved. I do not know what role was played by the\u00a0aesthetic factor, the\u00a0desire to co-tinue the\u00a0universally accepted great art of gardening, but undoubtedly at\u00a0the heart of this was an\u00a0at-tempt and will to shape the\u00a0natural landscape anew \u2013 and a\u00a0large-scale attempt it was. Perhaps it expressed the\u00a0might of the\u00a0state, which even endowed nature with a\u00a0kind of military discipline?<\/p>\n

The\u00a0 much-moving linden avenues (the linden is a\u00a0tree dedicated to Venus) create an\u00a0affi nity with the\u00a0capital of great Prussia \u2013 the\u00a0grand Unter den Lin-den avenue remains a\u00a0pride of Berlin.<\/p>\n

Avenues have stumbled upon bad times. They are threatened not only with the\u00a0trivial demand for timber, used as a\u00a0structural material or as fuel. The\u00a0cur-rent notions about traffi c security, supposedly undermined by trees, have become a\u00a0foe of avenues. But\u00a0luckily defenders of trees have also appeared.<\/p>\n

Lindens also surround the rebuilt K\u00f6nigsberg cathedral. The entire cathedral isle (once densely built over) is now a square, and a rather well maintained one. A figure that symbolically fills this space is Immanuel Kant, whose tomb can be found here and who is the only element of K\u00f6nigsberg\u2019s tradition accepted today. But it would be futile to look for the bridges which inspired Leonhard Euler to lay the foundations for graph theory (that is the so-called problem of royal bridges). It seems that the following people born here have been discarded from the city\u2019s memory: Ernst Teodor Amadeus Hoffman, whose stories inspired the famous opera; K\u00e4the Kollwitz, the first woman in the Prussian Academy of Arts, whose features were given by Ernst Barlach to his famous sculpture Der Schwebende<\/em>, a moving monument to the victims of the First World War; and Hannah Arendt, who spent her childhood and youth here. Well, perhaps the absence of her memory in Kaliningrad, as the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em>, is not purely coincidental\u2026<\/p>\n

Today Kaliningrad is dramatically looking for its identity. Building this identity will be extremely difficult, and to some extent it will become a test of Russia\u2019s European choice. So far the linden avenues, witnesses to the European landscape, continue to survive here. They still tie this strange enclave with its western neighbourhood.<\/p>\n

Translated from the Polish by Tomasz Biero\u0144<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"featured_media":2304,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[1054,558,519],"region":[],"kraj":[813],"magazyn":[235],"class_list":["post-2540","artykul","type-artykul","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-central-europe-en-en","tag-kaliningrad-2","tag-landscape-en","kraj-russia","magazyn-herito-08en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOnly Avenues - herito<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/herito.pl\/en\/artykul\/only-avenues\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Only Avenues - 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